Research Summary

Biomedical Informatics – the application of computing to problems related to clinical and life sciences – is a means to an end, which is the ultimate improvement of processes aimed at delivering better healthcare and better clinical/preclinical research. As such, it is highly collaborative and inter-disciplinary: problems are suggested by unsolved needs of clinicians and researchers in a variety of fields, and if the solution involves computing or information technology, that is where I come in. To ensure that the solution meets the approval of its users, it is developed in iterative cycles through close collaboration. While I thus provide "service", "research" comes from devising ways to deliver solutions efficaciously. To quote the late Saul Alinsky, Hell is a place where one does the same thing over and over again, and efficacious delivery often involves creating novel and generalizable approaches that save the trouble of having to repeatedly reinvent wheels.

My primary area of research involves capturing descriptions of electronic systems in sufficient detail, and with sufficient richness of structure, as to facilitate their understanding and documentation and more importantly, automation of operations that would otherwise require tedious manual programming. The latter aspect exemplifies what is called “creative laziness”: working harder initially to come up with a generalizable solution to a family of problems, which in turn reduces future effort by eliminating or greatly reducing programming/maintenance drudgery. The issue of electronic descriptions (metadata) is sufficiently broad as to apply in a variety of sub-domains: my publications are consequently fairly diverse, though I have focused in the past on support of system designs to support clinical and preclinical research.